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6 years ago
I bought three books during a recent sale. Two were LitRPG things that I got for research purposes.
"Dragon's Price": The Better Bits Of Final Fantasy
"Dragon's Price: Rise of the Horned Serpent" (by Daniel Potter of "Freelance Familiars") is fantasy, billed as inspired by "Final Fantasy". It has no game elements; it's just high fantasy with airships and dragons and crystals. Specifically, about a sky-pirate crew trying to survive a dragon attack and then escape from the monster's lair; surprisingly that's the entire story in book 1. I did enjoy it though, because it does what the FF games did in their better moments: show us cool stuff with people firing elemental crystal blasts and having airship fights and visiting weird places. In hindsight, FF's actual plots are pretty awful: evil dude wants to conquer the world with crystals but secretly a second evil dude wants to destroy reality, and you have to go kill him by hitting him with swords. Thankfully, "Dragon's Price" does not do that. Instead there's a little dragon-servant society that makes up much of the book's plot, and that was interesting to see. The draconic villain is not just a cardboard monster, has an agenda, and is developing an unusual hidden empire that I'd like to see more of.
Will I buy the second one? Maybe. I'm a little squeamish due to two remarks at the end that seem to say, "The second book is going to be about a bad guy doing creepy mental torture", but maybe I'm misreading it. (I had put down MCA Hogarth's "Even the Wingless" for similar reasons despite liking the writing style and setting.) I can definitely recommend this volume though.
"Party Hard": Game Fiction With Some Interesting Twists
"Party Hard (Pixel Dust Book 1)" by David Petrie is super edgy, according to a little game I've been playing with the LitRPG genre. I ask, "How far do I have to read down the list of standard playable races, on the Pathfinder RPG rules site, to find your main characters?" In this case there's a party of six: four humans, but the hero's best friend is playing the unpopular Fairy race, and one of the others is a Reynard who is human with animal ears plus tail. Also, one of the six (the Fairy) is playing an opposite-sex character and this is more than an occasional joke. I appreciate this effort to do something a little original with the character builds. That includes the classes: we have a Fury (gunslinger), a Coin (grappling-hook rogue), Venom (quick-damage mage as opposed to Cauldron), and the most generic is a Shield (energy-barrier specialist). I also award points for the unusual gimmick that the game is played while sleeping, making it affect people's real-world lifestyles in an unusual way.
The plot is mostly standard: Bad guy threatens a beloved game, and good guys have to complete an in-game quest that somehow stops this. In this case, a businessman hired a genius who invented this amazing technology, then fired him once the business was making money rather than letting him continue to innovate. But the twist here is that the businessman is the good guy; the genius has been doing unethical crazy experiments and it really wasn't necessary to interfere with the already-popular game to continue trying his mad science schemes. So, again, there are some unusual ideas here that help keep the story from being stale for me.
I enjoyed the character interaction. Read me a series of descriptions of how the hero is using his super cool magic spell to do lots of damage, and I'll get bored. Tell me instead about how Hero A is making a point of shielding Hero B while feeling guilty about Hero C, and what each of them sacrificed to get certain unique items or help the others past a trap, and how they react on meeting each other for real, and I'm much more likely to care what's going on. "Party Hard" succeeds at that.
What did I dislike? The plot isn't really resolved. There's what TVTropes called a Council of Vagueness, where villains mutter to each other with phrases like "All according to plan... We have an agent in place... Activate our secondary doomsday scheme." We never do find out quite what the villain was trying to accomplish, and that strikes me as less of a sequel hook than a refusal to wrap up a plotline and show its consequences. I also dislike the "oh no, somehow that person can't log out anymore!" trope because of the handwavy soft science it requires, and that element does rear its ugly head eventually. All in all though, I enjoyed this book.
"World-Tree Online": Nothing To Draw My Interest
I started reading "World-Tree Online" by E.A. Hooper. The hero is an old gamer who wants to escape from mourning his dead wife by logging into the amazing new video game, which dilates time to give people the experience of one month per real hour. You can play for weeks during a lunch break. As in "Party Hard" the notion of distorting people's perception of time is unusual and interesting, because it could greatly affect the real world. How does this story fare on having unusual and interesting races/classes/powers? Well, the hero starts playing, takes one look at his proposed character (just like him but younger and better looking) and hits Accept. Then he must play this super-innovative game by picking one rigidly defined class from a list almost directly copied from D&D: "Warden ('a tank class'), Fighter, Mage, Cleric, Ranger, Rogue". As an experienced gamer, the hero thinks this is pretty cool. I'm not sure why. Yes, full-immersion VR would be neat to experience, but otherwise the gameplay in the first 10% of the story is entirely standard. Kill monsters, take stuff, raise stats.
The POV then shifts to a Sheriff, a rare class of moderators who have surprisingly limited powers. If you're tasking someone with stopping attempted rapists within your game, and giving them unique enforcement powers, why would you limit those to rules like "you have to aim successfully and there's a one-minute cooldown"? The justification seems to be that the game-makers didn't want to appoint mods at all, were forced to, and made them as puny as possible.
Then, everybody gets notice of a software update that'll take 30 real hours, during which time logout is disabled and time dilation is cranked up to ludicrous levels and pain sensation is at 100% and all but one mod is nerfed. Why this combo of awfulness? There's a super AI running the game and it's just gone nuts or been maliciously reprogrammed, naturally the creators of a super AI have no control over it, and there's an implication that it's trying to establish better neural connections or something. In reviewing "Party Hard" I commented that I want to read about the "why" of combat more than the "what". Here, when I got to a scene of the hero watching an arena battle, I started skimming because I didn't care what was happening.
So, we have a blank-slate main character, with generic class/powers, in a standard plotline about people trapped in the game for unclear reasons, where the game itself is generic. If any of these elements were unique I might be interested, but as it is I have no reason to care. I know that this hero is grieving, he's elderly and he's a gamer, but that's all I know about him. What I know about the game's selling points is... the setting has worlds arranged along a tree structure, and combat is supposedly based on realistic physics rather than comparing numbers, but we're explicitly shown how a Power Level 250 attack can't beat a Power Level 300 shield.
I started skimming around 9% in and put this one down around 11%, so that's my number rating.
"Dragon's Price": The Better Bits Of Final Fantasy
"Dragon's Price: Rise of the Horned Serpent" (by Daniel Potter of "Freelance Familiars") is fantasy, billed as inspired by "Final Fantasy". It has no game elements; it's just high fantasy with airships and dragons and crystals. Specifically, about a sky-pirate crew trying to survive a dragon attack and then escape from the monster's lair; surprisingly that's the entire story in book 1. I did enjoy it though, because it does what the FF games did in their better moments: show us cool stuff with people firing elemental crystal blasts and having airship fights and visiting weird places. In hindsight, FF's actual plots are pretty awful: evil dude wants to conquer the world with crystals but secretly a second evil dude wants to destroy reality, and you have to go kill him by hitting him with swords. Thankfully, "Dragon's Price" does not do that. Instead there's a little dragon-servant society that makes up much of the book's plot, and that was interesting to see. The draconic villain is not just a cardboard monster, has an agenda, and is developing an unusual hidden empire that I'd like to see more of.
Will I buy the second one? Maybe. I'm a little squeamish due to two remarks at the end that seem to say, "The second book is going to be about a bad guy doing creepy mental torture", but maybe I'm misreading it. (I had put down MCA Hogarth's "Even the Wingless" for similar reasons despite liking the writing style and setting.) I can definitely recommend this volume though.
"Party Hard": Game Fiction With Some Interesting Twists
"Party Hard (Pixel Dust Book 1)" by David Petrie is super edgy, according to a little game I've been playing with the LitRPG genre. I ask, "How far do I have to read down the list of standard playable races, on the Pathfinder RPG rules site, to find your main characters?" In this case there's a party of six: four humans, but the hero's best friend is playing the unpopular Fairy race, and one of the others is a Reynard who is human with animal ears plus tail. Also, one of the six (the Fairy) is playing an opposite-sex character and this is more than an occasional joke. I appreciate this effort to do something a little original with the character builds. That includes the classes: we have a Fury (gunslinger), a Coin (grappling-hook rogue), Venom (quick-damage mage as opposed to Cauldron), and the most generic is a Shield (energy-barrier specialist). I also award points for the unusual gimmick that the game is played while sleeping, making it affect people's real-world lifestyles in an unusual way.
The plot is mostly standard: Bad guy threatens a beloved game, and good guys have to complete an in-game quest that somehow stops this. In this case, a businessman hired a genius who invented this amazing technology, then fired him once the business was making money rather than letting him continue to innovate. But the twist here is that the businessman is the good guy; the genius has been doing unethical crazy experiments and it really wasn't necessary to interfere with the already-popular game to continue trying his mad science schemes. So, again, there are some unusual ideas here that help keep the story from being stale for me.
I enjoyed the character interaction. Read me a series of descriptions of how the hero is using his super cool magic spell to do lots of damage, and I'll get bored. Tell me instead about how Hero A is making a point of shielding Hero B while feeling guilty about Hero C, and what each of them sacrificed to get certain unique items or help the others past a trap, and how they react on meeting each other for real, and I'm much more likely to care what's going on. "Party Hard" succeeds at that.
What did I dislike? The plot isn't really resolved. There's what TVTropes called a Council of Vagueness, where villains mutter to each other with phrases like "All according to plan... We have an agent in place... Activate our secondary doomsday scheme." We never do find out quite what the villain was trying to accomplish, and that strikes me as less of a sequel hook than a refusal to wrap up a plotline and show its consequences. I also dislike the "oh no, somehow that person can't log out anymore!" trope because of the handwavy soft science it requires, and that element does rear its ugly head eventually. All in all though, I enjoyed this book.
"World-Tree Online": Nothing To Draw My Interest
I started reading "World-Tree Online" by E.A. Hooper. The hero is an old gamer who wants to escape from mourning his dead wife by logging into the amazing new video game, which dilates time to give people the experience of one month per real hour. You can play for weeks during a lunch break. As in "Party Hard" the notion of distorting people's perception of time is unusual and interesting, because it could greatly affect the real world. How does this story fare on having unusual and interesting races/classes/powers? Well, the hero starts playing, takes one look at his proposed character (just like him but younger and better looking) and hits Accept. Then he must play this super-innovative game by picking one rigidly defined class from a list almost directly copied from D&D: "Warden ('a tank class'), Fighter, Mage, Cleric, Ranger, Rogue". As an experienced gamer, the hero thinks this is pretty cool. I'm not sure why. Yes, full-immersion VR would be neat to experience, but otherwise the gameplay in the first 10% of the story is entirely standard. Kill monsters, take stuff, raise stats.
The POV then shifts to a Sheriff, a rare class of moderators who have surprisingly limited powers. If you're tasking someone with stopping attempted rapists within your game, and giving them unique enforcement powers, why would you limit those to rules like "you have to aim successfully and there's a one-minute cooldown"? The justification seems to be that the game-makers didn't want to appoint mods at all, were forced to, and made them as puny as possible.
Then, everybody gets notice of a software update that'll take 30 real hours, during which time logout is disabled and time dilation is cranked up to ludicrous levels and pain sensation is at 100% and all but one mod is nerfed. Why this combo of awfulness? There's a super AI running the game and it's just gone nuts or been maliciously reprogrammed, naturally the creators of a super AI have no control over it, and there's an implication that it's trying to establish better neural connections or something. In reviewing "Party Hard" I commented that I want to read about the "why" of combat more than the "what". Here, when I got to a scene of the hero watching an arena battle, I started skimming because I didn't care what was happening.
So, we have a blank-slate main character, with generic class/powers, in a standard plotline about people trapped in the game for unclear reasons, where the game itself is generic. If any of these elements were unique I might be interested, but as it is I have no reason to care. I know that this hero is grieving, he's elderly and he's a gamer, but that's all I know about him. What I know about the game's selling points is... the setting has worlds arranged along a tree structure, and combat is supposedly based on realistic physics rather than comparing numbers, but we're explicitly shown how a Power Level 250 attack can't beat a Power Level 300 shield.
I started skimming around 9% in and put this one down around 11%, so that's my number rating.
On the pathfinder race scale it goes into the Uncommon list for the narrator and everyone else is variants of the main races.
The battles themselves are quite short.
I enjoyed "Party Hard" for having some unusual classes and a slightly unusual "save the game world" plot where the rich corporate dude is actually a good guy.